Little by little most of the organizations already have a grasp on technology for the development and to be competitive among others with the aid of information system technology. With the wide acceptance of information system as a valuable organizational resource that can potentially give back a huge amount of return of investment, strategic planning of information system has been considered to be a crucial part of the business plan of most companies nowadays. By definition, strategic information systems planning, also known as simply SISP, is the process whereby an organization establishes a long-range plan of computer-based applications in order to achieve its goals. With the huge potential benefits of an effective information system, it is very important for an IS consultant to know the right questions to ask to the company officers not only to fully assess the information system needs of the company but also develop an effective strategic information system plan.
Strategic Information Technology
Strategic Information System Planning as for any other system do begin with the identification of the needs- whether needs of the organization or need of the system itself. To be more efficient and effective, development of any type of computer-based system should be a response to need--whether at the transaction processing level or at the more complex information and support systems levels. The mentioned planning for information systems is much akin to strategic planning in management. Note that objectives, priorities, and authorization for information systems projects need to be formalized. The systems development plan should identify specific projects slated for the future, priorities for each project and for resources, general procedures, and constraints for each application area. Furthermore, the strategic plan must be precise enough to make possible the understanding of each application and to know where it stands in the order of development. Also, it should be flexible so that priorities can be adjusted if necessary in some cases. I am also referring to the need for continuously updating and improving IS architecture. I have read that “SISP is the analysis of a corporation’s information and processes using business information models together with the evaluation of risk, current needs and requirements.” (Pant, Hsu, 1995). The result is an action plan showing the desired course of events necessary to align information use and needs with the strategic direction of the company. In developing a strategic information system plan, lots of questions are possible to be asked to the company officers as part of the process. As long as it will be beneficial to the development and would give a result that can help to the success of it, it has no doubt accepted. Here are some of the questions that can be asked to the company officers that based on the three phase methodology of strategic information system planning.
Strategic information systems planning is a disciplined, systematic approach to determining the most effective and efficient means of satisfying organizational information needs. It is a top-down, structured approach which, to be successful, must employ technical and managerial processes in a systems engineering context. Under this approach, the characteristics of the system’s hardware, software, facilities, data, and personnel are identified and defined through detailed design and analysis to achieve the most cost-effective system for satisfying the organization’s needs. The process must consider system life cycle management and the organization’s policy and budget as important integral factors, and include all organizational participants (e.g., managers, users, maintainers, operators, and designers) throughout the process. It is an iterative process in that changes identified during the process must be evaluated to determine their effect on completed analyses. Strategic information systems planning is not a one-time event-it should be revisited periodically to ensure a system’s continued viability in meeting information needs and achieving long-term missions. Information systems are important tools for effectively meeting organizational objectives. Readily available, complete, and accurate information is essential for making informed and timely decisions. Being unable to obtain needed data, wading through unneeded data, or inefficiently processing needed data wastes resources. The organization must identify its information needs on the basis of a systematic identification and analysis of its mission and functions to be performed, who is to perform them, the information and supporting data needed to perform the functions, and the processes needed to most usefully structure the information. Successful information system development and acquisition must include a rigorous and disciplined process of data gathering, evaluation, and analysis prior to committing significant financial and human resources to any information system development. While implementing such an approach may not preclude all information system acquisition problems, it should produce detailed knowledge of organizational missions and operations, user information needs and alternatives to address those needs, and an open and flexible architecture that is expandable or that can be upgraded to meet future needs. The purpose and use of information system in the beginning was targeted towards reducing manual labor and increasing efficiency and thus reducing cost of doing business. Cost has thus been the ‘primal instinct’ justification for the usage of Information system in companies. Management seems to still use this justification even in today’s day and age because the IT salesman still thinks it’s the best and only way to get management buy-in. Moreover, as most other rationales used for IS have proved hard to sell, both the IT sales teams and their customers find a comfort zone in cost savings. This could also be because both sides (from all their previous experiences) are convinced of their failure before they even start out on a different track. The past experiences, in most cases were times they tried, half heartedly probably, without enough experience and failed. These failures have resulted in the baby being thrown out along with the dirty water. Systems are usually laid out at different levels. The lowest rung in the ladder is taken by the TRANSACTIONAL information system. These are ones like ‘Pont Of Sales’ systems used in the store counters, or book keeping systems mentioned earlier. These are systems targeting cost reduction, capturing repetitive activities and assisting the human using it to become more efficient in handling larger volumes of transactions.
The OPERATIONAL or operation support systems are usually build combining several Transactional systems in a logical sequence so as to make the operation of any particular division/functional group more efficient. Classic example is the integration of Accounting, Payroll, HR, and Inventory, Production etc. to form a MRP or ERP system. Or POS, Customer Account Info, Accounting, etc. linked together to form a CRM system. A very critical component for operational systems is their reporting systems. They provide the reports that combine and merge the reports/information from several transactional systems to provide reports to help executives manage operations in a synchronized and optimized manner. Thus, they act as enablers and help managers to keep track of various parameters so as to keep the whole operation smooth and efficient.
STRATEGIC systems are little more complicated. They cross the regular operational boundaries and become tools that form the basis for senior management to plan, execute and monitor the organization. They help in keeping track of the Key Performance Indicators by combining and logically sorting information from various Operational and Transactional systems all across the company and at times combining it with external information from sources like the stock market, industry sources, partners and even competitors. Designing STRATEGIC information system requires a thought process of a ‘good’ CEO with an understanding of the business from the top, various information sources present in the company and outside in platforms that need to be collated, combined and extracted into a tool to help run the company in a more informed and responsive manner.
Phase 1 Preliminary Assessment
1. What are the present capabilities of the IS department of your company (if there is one)?
2. Describe the readiness of the company to use IS.
3. What is the status of the customers and the industry with respect to your company?
Phase 2 Business Strategy Analysis
1. What are the current management strategies of your company with respect to IS?
( ex. Bleeding edge, leading edge, lagging edge, single vendor strategy, outsourcing)
2. How effective are your current IS strategies?
3. What are the problems that your company encountered with your current IS strategy?
Phase 3 Strategic IS planning
1. What do you want to achieve in the future? ( Setting Goals)
The answer to this question will help me assess the goals of the company of acquiring an information system strategy. This would enable me to generally set the goals of the SISP that I will develop for the company.
2. What are your measurable targets? ( Setting Objectives )
The answer to this question will help me assess the effectiveness of the steps and strategies that I have chosen as the SISP of the company. The answer to this question generally sets the objectives of the company’s SISP. The objectives of the SISP should be measurable in order to measure the effectiveness of the strategy and An example of a measurable target would be the return of investment over a specific period time.
3. What are your company policies when it comes to acquisition of an information system?
In an organization, strategic information systems plan (SISP) is really important because it is a tool in which the organization can attain their successful development and improvement of the system. By doing that, of course all the people involved should gather to discuss what to do. And one way to understand what will be doing is the guidelines which are the questions that everyone should talk about and discuss. Below are questions than can also be considered to asked to the company officers:
1.) What are the business mission, objectives, and goals?
Here, it analyses the processes for all the data needed. It will identify the data currently required to perform the processes. It describes the overall information system architecture comprised of databases and applications as well as the installation schedule of individual systems.
2.) What will be the expected output of this project you want to have?
After knowing their business mission, objectives and goals, it should be given an emphasis of what the company wants to have in a certain project and to know exactly the expected output or finish product so that it will be concentrated to what is its goal to achieve.
3.) Who are the persons involved in this project?
The PEOPLE Issue represents the readiness of the organization to absorb technology and awareness factors. This if overlooked can be a major cause of failure for any plan during the implementation phase. By this, everyone will know all the persons they will be working with or dealing with so that in times of there will be something wrong happen, they used to know who to ask or to talk to fix such problem.
4.) Does your company willing to provide sufficient budget either it will be big or small project?
Factors that become critical at the stage of doing projects are the availability of budget. All plans should be supported through a justification on the basis of cost savings, (but, of course) opportunity cost and strategic rationale like competitive advantage, perception etc. amongst other factors. Asking this is a big help because budget is the mainly needed for it is in here in which the project will be going through whatever it takes. It is the one in which why certain project will be establish or is established.
5.) Ready to reengineer?
It provides techniques or building enterprise models, data models, and process models. These form a comprehensive knowledge base which then creates and maintains information systems.
6.) How much is the allotted time for the project?
Persons involved should have to discuss about how much time will be consume to take for this project. By knowing this, each can have a managed time and how they will use it to finish certain project.
7.) How company deal with the changes?
Changes here means that everyone should study also of the existing TECHNOLOGY platform within the company, the infrastructure, the state and format of the data and information present. Along with all this, the governance of technology is also something to watch out for. It becomes important to manage the chaos that would naturally result from too many ‘technology’ cooks in a company. The standards, responsibility and approval structure in selecting and implementing technology choices have to be clear and specific in order to avoid pain of integration and obsolescence.
In the end, choosing questions that are necessary to be answered by the company officers as part of the planning will play a big role in the success of it. In choosing questions,one should be careful and think-through on the importance of it and the output it will give because by these questions, necessary information that is very essential in the overall process are at risk. On top of it, giving attention to the questions to give away only shows one point, which is to acquire the vital information that can be gathered by appropriate questions to be asked.
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